Ethnic Turkish Expansion

Razib Khan has been publishing a three part series on the genetics and human population history of Anatolia on his Unsupervised Learning platform. His latest, on how Anatolia became Turkish is here and opens with the useful summary map below. 

The site is worth subscribing to, if you have the time for it, and the quality is, as usual, first rate: artfully written and informed by Razib's wide historical, linguistic and genetic knowledge. I agree pretty much 100% with the narrative told by the map below.

Turkish invaders ca. 1100 CE (a quite accurate estimate, more specifically, it is historically attested to have happened in 1071 CE) led to language shift in Anatolia, even though genetic estimates are that these invaders account for only perhaps 8%-20% of modern Turkish genetic ancestry (probably closer to the low end of that range). Their expansion was a classic case of expanding herder tribes confronting sedentary farmers.

Turkish expansion predates the Mongolian Empire and postdates by centuries, the Bronze Age. Their expansion was arguably the last of a series of sweeps east to west and west to east across the general region of roughly comprised of the Pontic Caspian steppe, Central Asia and Siberia that persisted. The Mongolian Empire left only a weak trace after it collapsed, but one could arguably call Russian expansion to the east the last sweep.